This year, Lent at Georgetown University is competing with Sex Positive Week. Beginning Feb. 23, Georgetown students spent six days educating themselves on the meaning of Sex Positivity through panels, discussion and a question-and-answer session with sex educators Tristan Taormino and Jenny Block.
Jesuit priest John Carroll founded Georgetown University in 1773 with the goal of furthering American Catholicism. Patrick Reilly, president of the Cardinal Newman Society, said that Sex Positive Week contradicted Georgetown’s founding principles because it went against the Catholic principle that sex is only acceptable in the context of marriage.
The fact that Sex Positive Week was planned the same week as Lent, a 40-day period preparing for the celebration of Easter, was especially offensive.
Taormino, an anal-sex adviser and the director of award-winning lesbian erotica, begs to differ. “I think we need to stop pitting religion and sex against each other, and I think Catholics do this the best of anyone,” Taormino said. “We’ve seen how this has failed people on several levels.”
Olivia Chitayat, Georgetown Sex Positive Week student organizer, described Sex Positive as a movement promoting events, classes and media aimed at helping people become comfortable in their unique sexual lifestyles.
It is a topic familiar to students at more than 40 colleges and universities that have hosted Sex Positive events of their own.
In Taormino’s opinion, a Sex Positive lifestyle promotes psychological, physical and spiritual health. Conversations about safety, violence and boundaries play a critical role in that health. “I feel like that’s an integral part of the week -- not just saying you can go have sex, but you can go have sex and have information about it and be safe about it,” Chitayat said.
Although the week only drew about 30 out of Georgetown’s 15,318 students, it received a lot of attention on campus, some of it unwelcome. Chitayat’s Sex Positive banner and flyers were torn or taken down, and students from Catholic groups sent negative emails.
Andrea Pittaluga, co-chair of the Interfaith Council at Georgetown said, “I feel it is a misinterpretation of the right to freedom of speech, I also feel that words such as empowerment, safety and health are being grossly distorted in an effort to get rid of the notion of perversion and make any consensual sexual behavior normal and acceptable.”
In Pittaluga’s view, Georgetown, being a Catholic school, should not financially contribute to organizations offensive to Catholicism and that on campus, Catholic views should always be represented alongside alternative viewpoints.

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